How Long Have You Been a Linux User?

I started on Macs in '92 and dwelled in Windoze World since '94. I had been thinking about switching to Linux for a few years but didn't throw myself into it until I bought a new laptop at the end of '07 and it came with Vista. That was more than sufficient incentive, I tells ya!

In Jan '08 I set up a dual-boot with Vista and Ubuntu Gutsy, and in the four months that followed, I realized that I booted up Vista about three times. When Hardy released, I wiped the whole machine and got rid of the dual-boot.

I'm absolutely loving the experience.

I discovered Linux sometime in 1992 - I forget which distribution, but a friend of mine gave me about 10 diskettes from which I installed and obtained a working OS without X windows.

Then in 1993 I started dowloading 20 disks of the SLS distribution. I really liked that one.
In February of 1994 I moved to Slackware 0.9 something and right away loved it.
It also consisted of about 20 disks. I remember I even got X windows to work after manually calculating the vert, horiz refresh rates , etc. The steps to do this were in a document created by Eric Raymond (I may be wrong about this though).

I have been using Slackware ever since (from 1994) and I have never used
MS Windows at home. I have only used it at work because I have had to, although most of my real programming was done on SCO Unix, SUN/Solaris, HP/UX.

I must say that if Linux had not been invented and created, today I would probably not be using a computer at home at all - Linux is one of the most wonderful technological products ever created!

Everytime I use MS Windows I just feel like laughing at it - it is just an expensive joke.

I am an "OLD" guy now, and I can tell you I do not wax melodramatic anymore, but there is simply no product, or tool that is so intelligently designed, well built, liberating, useful, and fun to use, as is Linux.

Might as well take this opportunity to publicly thank Linus Torvalds and EVERYONE who has had a hand in making Linux what it is today.

and thanks for this survey.

Been using Ubuntu since November 2007 and I'll never go back to MS as long as this distro or equivalent is available. Only ever used MS (yes, a 'point and click idiot') but I've never been happy with it for lots of reasons. First tried Xandros 4/5 years ago but availability of equivalent apps was a sticking point. Last year decided to build my own pc and was determined not to put Windows on it. Found Mr Shuttleworth's great OS and have not looked back. Still finding my feet with the terminal/command line. Forums etc are real help. I just can't get over the incredible input of so many people to bring open source software to the world. People like me owe them so much. Thank you to everyone that contributes!

Rich

Been around since kernel 0.99pl12. Suscribed to the slackware CD's.

At the time I had had a Tandon 386sx25 laptop with 20MB hard disk, and 2MB RAM (I think).. Took 4 hours to build the kernel..

Fun poll! Linux became my exclusive platform in either '92 or '93, it's hard to remember now. I never had a pre-1.0 kernel, but it wasn't long after. I installed from 32 floppies after complaining to a friend about trying to find a decent OS (I'd been through Win 3.1, 3.11, and OS/2). He said "dude, those suck... try this."

My fun memories: manual "configuring" monitor timings! fvwm (version 1), twm, NO wm (just an xterm), etc. Mosaic. NCSA httpd. Compiling every last thing from source myself. Writing shell scripts to fetch the latest kernel and notify me. Running a public server on a static SLIP IP with a 14.4 modem. Fun times!

I feel a little uneasy, as all of you seem to be have been aboard for much more than me.
Anyway, my first experience with Linux was with Fedora Core 3, as I needed a Linux box to study. I'm so ashamed of the many mistakes I did as a first-timer!

Anyway, years have passed, but it's still nice and also funny, not to mention I somehow became the sysadmin of a 33 Gentoo diskless boxes cluster + all the others behind the scene, and a pretty much enthusiast Debian user, spreading the word as much as possible.

Slackware, July 94 with 4MB of ram. No X-windows, it still worked better than the competition.

Wow, I've enjoyed reading these entries!
I was a pretty new faculty member when back in 1995 I decided that I needed more computing power. I couldn't afford Unix for a PC, and the offerings were limited at my institution. I didn't want to wait for the long overdue Windows 95, and Apple simply could not offer what I was looking for. So I made the switch to OS/2 Warp (which I still love). But at the same time, we became one of the first biology departments in the USA to have its own web site, all running on Linux on a second-hand PC. Several years later, I was a researcher at U. of Arizona, and the future of Warp was becoming painfully obvious. I remembered Linux. So, when in late 1997 my mom asked what I wanted for Christmas, I told her to pick me up one of those Red Hat boxed sets in Barnes and Noble! I installed it, and then had Linux, OS/2 and Windows 3.11 all running on the same machine (now those were real machines!). A couple of weeks later, I sat down to write a National Science Foundation proposal (a complicated and painful task), and taught myself Linux and LaTeX at the same time. I never looked back, and eventually reclaimed all the disk space for Linux. And I got the grant btw. Linux changed my life!

It would have been late in '98. I had a new computer job (studied Aeronautical Tech), Win 98 had FINALLY been released, and sucked eggs. My supervisor offered to let me install this program called Linux (RedHat 5.1) if I could figure it out on my own. At the time, I knew how to install Windows and knew nothing else. During the install, I notice a language that caught my eye, Redneck. That was most fun I had ever had with a computer and only use Windows when I have to (at work). I then used Mandrake 7.1 and stayed with Mandrake until they switched to Mandriva. Work took me in a slightly different direction and I started using Slolaris (2.5, 2.6, 7, and 8) and did little with Linux (I did do some tests with Linux on a SparcStation 5). Currently I use Ubuntu 7.10 and Debian 4.0.

In the summer of '93, I was complaining among my Sun-using co-workers that there was no low-cost Unix to run on a PC. One MIT grad told me his brother was using something called Linux, that it was GPL, and that it was going to be good since it was being developed cooperatively. Then in December '93 my boss lent me 50 or so 1.44M floppies that he had downloaded over several days at 9600 baud. That was Slackware, and I loaded it onto my homebuilt 386 + 387 + 4Meg RAM + 420MB system. I booted the 0.99r13 kernel and saw my first Linux prompt---in my own apartment! Very thrilling!

I have in front of me now "Vol 1 Edition 1, $4.00 March 1994" of Linux Journal, the first article being "Linux Code Freeze" by Linux Torvalds.

We decided to use Red Hat in my company when it first came out in '95, so we paid something like $50 for a pretty CD to use on about six machines. I remember having a little problem setting up NFS and calling Red Hat's non-800 number. A guy answered and said "Red Hat". I posed my question and he answered it unceremoniously---all in probably less than a minute and with no names taken or support fees paid.

I registered on the Linux Counter probably sometime in 1995, being something like the 5000th registrant. Of course by then there were already many tens of thousands of unregistered Linux users.

I used to be a sysadmin at MIT circa 1990, working in an initiative co-sponsored by DEC, IBM and MIT, called Project Athena. Among many other things, I used to test new DEC RISC hardware before it was available to the general public. The DEC-MIT relationship was so close that the salesperson in charged of the MIT account had a permanent office at the school. She only went to DEC once a week or something. The coolest event was when DEC rented the largest ship (QE2) on the seas, plus another big vessel, in order to receive the DEC World guests, after renting every single hotel room in Boston.

Anywho... One day DEC brought a kid from Finland, to tell us all about his baby OS. It was a very large auditorium, so crowded that there were people sitting on the floor. We offered Linus disk space and FTP servers so he could distribute his operating system kernel to the world.

I may be wrong, but I believe that was the day RMS and Linus met.

-Ramon

Going back in history I started out with a smith corona DDC 400 XT (hopefully that the right model, basically a big box with a small screen and two floppy drives for the systems disk and program disk) From there I eventually upgraded to a tandem with a whole 1gig hard driver and this O.S. called win95(back when the internet was pure); From there I moved to a Dell with XP, but after being bombarded with viruses, I had to move to something that was less vulnerable."Linux", This was around 2003,
"After getting to know how to navigate", "I can't imagine using something else". So how long have I been using Linux? around six years, but how long have I been in front of a computer about 20 years.
regards;

Justin P. Mattock

Actually I was running Linux back in 1991 on a 486DX PC with 8Mb RAM and 80Mb drive (10Mb was swap). Amazing considering I had full X11 and development tools installed. The install took 30 floppies that I had to create using rawrite in DOS (which took HOURs).

This was before Alan Cox got involved - he was too busy writing MUDs and playing on his Amiga :-)

Slackware 1.3 was my first distro. I attended a conference in 1995 where people from University Santa Maria (100 km far) showed Mosaic running in XWindows... I got impressed and a few months later we got our first copy of those 95 3.5 inch floppy disks that were installed with finger crossed... happy penguin and Linux evangelist since then. Thanks to all who have contributed, I think we are making History.

1999, I guess!
Linux was... as Lotus 123, as first Mac, as my first modem...
### love at first sight ###
Vive la liberte!!

I have been using Linux since you could run from two floppies ...

After my Amiga broke down around -97, I put together a PC from spare parts from friends.
Not satisfied with Windows 95, I got a copy of Boot Magazine which came with Debian 1.3. (From the news archive on Debian.org, I can trace it to November -97)
After that satisfying experience I bought a full version of Debian, and later Redhat (this was before I could download the whole OS from the Net in a reasonable time [19 k modem], having to buy the physical CD's), but then moved back to Debian because I saw Debian as more "DIY-friendly", which fitted me better.
Have used Debian since, on both servers and desktops, but recently switched to (k)ubuntu on the desktop.

hmm...actually my first contact was in 2004 end year... when im in first year @ STT Telkom...when i frustated cauze broken heart...Linux become my girl friend...
hahaha

i've been try Redhat 9.0 , Linspire 4, Slackware 9.0 and Debian...
but my true love is Slackware...hahaha...

Thanx to Denny Zulfikar for teach me LINUX
Now i become one of Researcher @ Internet Application Research Development Lab , OS Development n become Lecturer @ PRogram Profesional Computer Network Management

I don't know HOW I missed "1996-1999. Version 2.0." - I was certain I didn't see that when I wrote the previous note.

Sigh ...